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East of Denver

A Novel

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Overview

Winner of the 2013 Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction – a poignant, darkly comic debut novel about a father and son finding their way together as their livelihood inexorably disappears

When Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams returns to the family farm in eastern Colorado to bury his dead cat, he finds his widowed father, Emmett, living in squalor. There’s no money, the land is fallow, and a local banker has cheated the senile Emmett out of the majority of the farm equipment and his beloved Cessna.

Unemployed and without prospects, Shakespeare settles in as caretaker to both his dad and the farm while simultaneously getting drawn into an unlikely clique of former classmates. Threatened with the farm’s foreclosure, Shakespeare, Emmett, and his misfit friends hatch a half-serious plot to rob the very bank that stole their future.

Praise

“This is writing on a par with that of top-flight black-comic novelists like Sam Lipsyte and Jess Walter, and it deserves to be read.” —Lev Grossman, bestselling author of The Magicians

"A fine first novel from a writer with a great sense of character." —Booklist